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Elections are about winning and losing. Sometimes, though, playing a politician in a made-for-TV movie is a lose-lose proposition — especially when the real-life politician is as famous, divisive and high-profile as Sarah Palin.

Julianne Moore knew from the moment she agreed to play Palin in Game Change, filmmaker Jay Roach’s made-for-HBO film about the infighting and backstabbing behind the scenes during the 2008 U.S. Republican presidential campaign, that she would be under the media microscope.

“Oh, wow,” Moore recalled, earlier this year in Los Angeles. “I knew I would have to do a tremendous amount of research. It’s daunting to play somebody who is not only a living figure, but a hugely well-known one. So, for me, the most important thing was accuracy. I wanted to be as accurate as I could in my characterization. It was just four years ago, after all.”

As Game Change readies for its premiere — Saturday, March 10 on HBO — the film’s version of events, and Moore’s interpretation of the one-time Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate, has crossed over into the culture wars of the real world.

Current and former aides to Palin have lashed out at what they say is an inaccurate portrait of Palin during the fateful days and hours leading up to the November 2008 election victory by U.S. President Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, over Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate, Palin.

Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, released a mock trailer of its own, titled Fact Change, on March 1, countering Game Change’s view that Palin was a devoted small-town politician and hockey mom who became increasingly unhinged as the campaign wore on.

“I have profound respect for the historical nature of her candidacy,” Moore said. “To be taken out of a state government and be thrust onto the national stage like that created this enormous pressure, and I wanted to be faithful to that. What does that do to somebody psychologically? The fact that she was able to perform as well as she did was, to me, simply amazing.”

The TV film’s version of events is based on the book, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin and the Race of a Lifetime, by Time magazine editor-at-large Mark Halperin and New York magazine political correspondent and columnist John Heilemann. Filmmaker Roach and writer Danny Strong opted to focus on Palin and McCain for their TV-film version. Roach and Strong worked together on the 2008 Emmy Award-winning HBO film, Recount, about legal wrangling over votes during the 2000 presidential campaign, Game Change depicts Palin as a small-town politician and short-term Alaska state governor who was woefully unprepared for the national stage. The program shows Palin on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as McCain campaign strategists increasingly began to blame her for their candidate’s falling behind Obama in the polls. Game Change tells its story from the point of view of chief McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, played by Woody Harrelson, and McCain-Palin senior campaign adviser, Nicolle Wallace, played by Sarah Paulson.

“I’m portraying a real human being,” Moore said, “and it’s my responsibility as an actor to be as accurate as possible. In all the research I did, this was a person who was clearly not prepared. We have her displaying moments of sheer brilliance. At her unveiling at the national convention, I think the whole country took a collective gasp, like, ‘Who is she? Where is she from?’ She was so incredibly charismatic, so unbelievably able to communicate, and a true populist. In a country where most of our leaders have been Ivy League-educated white men, suddenly, there was this working-class mother who just popped out and seemed to be able to command the world.

“Of course, on further inspection, she didn’t necessarily have the experience necessary to lead our country, either as vice-president or, potentially, president. That’s what we tried to dramatize: her moments of brilliance, her populism, her charisma, and then, her lack of experience.

“I watched her reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, to familiarize myself with the family and the family dynamic, and I found it, frankly, adorable. What you see is a very caring, very involved parent. When have we seen a parent portrayed in that way, in politics? This is a woman who had a 19-year-old son and a four-month-old, and she was in politics. It was really compelling and interesting to me to see what she juggled during those 60 days.”

Game Change opens and closes with moments from a now-famous 2010 segment on 60 Minutes, in which correspondent Anderson Cooper quizzed Schmidt about decisions made during the McCain-Palin campaign. During the interview, Schmidt admitted that “in the immediate aftermath” of selecting Palin as McCain’s running mate, “it was clear to us that we had a lot of work to do.” In a trick of 21st-century digital technology, Harrelson-as-Schmidt is digitally inserted into the 60 Minutes segment with Cooper.

While the made-for-TV version of events is told from Schmidt’s point of view, the focus is on Palin.

“I hired a vocal coach, because, to me, she has an incredibly idiosyncratic way of speaking, and I felt I needed to capture that,” Moore explained. “We looked at hours and hours of footage. I listened to her on tape. I read her book. I read her assistant’s book. I read absolutely everything I could get my hands on.”

The more Moore started to play Palin, the more she began to understand her. She shares some character traits with the former Alaska state governor and hockey mom, she said, especially the mom part.

“I chased town an ice-skating coach once, because they messed up the music to my daughter’s program,” Moore said, with a wan smile. “We’ve all had experiences we’re perhaps not so proud of, where we’ve become really intense about our children. I can relate to that. I think every parent can.

“I can relate to the pressure she faced, too. When you’re working as an actor, people keep changing the lines. You memorize a new set of lines every day, and then the next day, they say, ‘No. This one. No. This one. No, this one.’ That was happening to her, constantly. They were coaching her. One person would say, ‘Approach it from this angle,’ and then somebody else would come up and say, ‘No, this idea is better.’ It was one thing on top of the other, and after a while, she was ready to explode. Anyone can relate to that.”

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Julianne Moore's Game Change

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